Us Five Forever
Olivia Herrera's closest friend Kyle went missing at a frat house two years ago. A party at that frat house is her chance to investigate what happened to him, and get to the bottom of a strange connection she shares with her former group of friends.
Project Type:
Indie Game
Link:
Roles:
Level Designer
Programmer
Game Designer
Asset Management
US Five Forever is a Third Person 3D narrative based mystery game that I have been working on as a Level Designer, Programmer, and Producer. Designed the gameplay and levels while working directly in the Godot Game Engine. I programmed an interactable mini-game and conversation system. The rest of my focus was on maximizing the space to emphasize the game's narrative based systems.
Level Design, Programming
My main responsibilities as a Level Designer was to focus on collisions and smooth transference between spaces. The game spaces needed to be adjusted and polished. As someone who joined at a later moment in the design timeline I brought a new perspective. To do this well I played the version of the game we had at that moment and tried to write down what I saw. I saw that there were issues with 3d spacing and character collisions issues. I brought what I noticed to the other designers and they told me to begin work on that. And so I did I fixed many of the collision issue while also making sure I didn't change the identity of the game.
Another on of my responsibilities was working on the Beer pong Mini-game and questline. Working with two other programmers. I worked teaching myself Inkle and Godot's own Programming language. This was an exciting challenge as I hadn't worked with these two systems before in such a technical aspect. But I was able to create a fantastic mini-game system that felt responsive and exciting. The mini - game would play an animation based on the choice you made as the player. We created a system that let you the player make mistakes while still winning. The program made it so each cup choice would give the player two options in how they would throw the ball. The choices themselves would decide if the player made the shot or missed it.
Some of these choices were slightly vague, with the choice having a different outcome then the expected one. This was a decision made thanks to the fantastic design choices of Telltale Games in their games like The Walking Dead. In those games some of the most memorable moments would be where you would make a decision and the character would do something unexpected or different. These moments would make players think more carefully about which choice they made in the future. We took that design route when making this game.
In the polishing stage of the game we had many issues with collisions. What I did was remap the collision pathing of the whole level. I remade each collision box and went around using information from multiple play tests to make sure we could prevent future issues.
